Which contracts your clients should sign A photographer asked a great question about contracts recently: I would like to redo my contracts. Would like to know what do you get clients to sign before a shoot? Disclaimer: This note is a fairly broad overview of many of the major themes you, as a photographer, should think about and which contracts…

Facebook has updated its terms of service and data use policy recently and the changes have upset many people. I’ve started seeing more declarations of users’ intention to opt-out of provisions of Facebook’s terms and conditions. These sorts of declarations seem to be legally binding with their fairly legalistic language but they don’t work except to help you feel better.…

You may have heard that photographers are not permitted to take photos of Cape Town Stadium. The issue came up at the 2014 Advertising and Marketing Law Conference and I asked IP attorney, Hugh Melamdowitz, about the ban. It turns out that copyright in the architectural drawings of the stadium were assigned to the City of Cape Town and the…

I’ve been preparing for my presentation at the Advertising and Marketing Law Conference on 15 October and reading through some materials I’ll probably reference in my slides. One paragraph just stood out for me in Anil Dash’s article “What is Public?“: The conventional wisdom is “Don’t publish anything on social media that you wouldn’t want to see on the front page…

I am moderating what will almost certainly be a fascinating discussion about BYOD, enterprise data security and device management at the BlackBerry Experience event at Montecasino in Fourways, Johannesburg today. The event is hosted by BlackBerry in partnership with ITWeb Events and will also take place in Durban and Cape Town later this month. The speakers at the event will…

That the respondent in the latest High Court Facebook defamation case, M v B, was ordered to remove defamatory posts on Facebook isn’t remarkable. What is more interesting about that case is that it reiterates a principle that a court will not step in and proactively block future defamatory posts. The applicant in this case, M (SAFLII redacts personal information…

Recent reports about hacked celebrity iCloud accounts seem to be attributable a vulnerability in iOS’ Find My iPhone service which enabled someone trying to gain access to an iCloud account to use a brute force attack to guess the account password. A brute force attack involves guessing a large number of possible passwords until the correct one pops up and…

Privacy is more than a couple settings and a consent checkbox on a form somewhere. Privacy and publicity seem to be pretty straightforward concepts and, legally, they are treated fairly superficially and defined mechanically. A result of that is a similarly superficial treatment in conversations about privacy and publicity in social and commercial engagements which rarely touches on what privacy…

Aside

According to The Guardian, Apple has imposed contractual restrictions on developers that prohibit them from sharing health data they may receive through an anticipated range of health-related apps which iOS 8 will usher in through a platform called HealthKit:

Its new rules clarify that developers who build apps that tap into HealthKit, of which Nike is rumoured to be one, can collect the data it holds.

But, they stated, the developers “must not sell an end-user’s health information collected through the HealthKit APIs to advertising platforms, data brokers or information resellers”. Although, the rules add that they could share their data with “third parties for medical research purposes” as long as they get users’ consent.

These sorts of apps have enormous potential to benefit consumers and, at the same time, they represent a profound risk to consumers because our most intimate personal information is being accessed. How developers and device manufacturers handle this data is bound to inform a new generation of privacy complaints and reputational harm case studies in the years to come.

This point in Kevin O’Keefe’s article titled “Facebook eliminating the junk in your News Feed” on Facebook “click bait” made an interesting point about using Facebook more to improve its value to you as a user: All too lawyers and other professionals I speak with complain about all the junk they see on Facebook. Part of the reason is that…